It's a blog

Month: January 2016

On the 28th of January 2016 all Wikimedia MediaWiki APIs had 2 short outages. The outage is documented on Wikitech here.

The outage didn’t have much of an impact on most projects hosted by Wikimedia. However due to most Wikidata editing happening through the API, even when using the UI, the project basically stopped for roughly 30 minutes.

Interestingly there is an unusual increase in the edit rate 30 minutes after recovery.

My first and currently only Joomla component development was for the SWA UK website. The component manages memberships, events, tickets, results and more and is a rewrite of a previous component for Joomla 1.

But in this post lets ignore what the component does and instead concentrate the development workflow that is used. After lots of research at the beginning of development I decided to ignore other methods of developing a component and this is what I ended up coming up with.

Wikidata provides free and open access to entities representing real world concepts. Of course Wikidata is not meant to contain every kind of data, for example beer reviews or product reviews would probably never make it into Wikidata items. However creating an app that is powered by Wikidata & Wikibase to contain beer reviews should be rather easy.

As with last year the event took place in the Mission Bay Center, San Francisco, California. The event was slightly earlier this year, positioned at the beginning of January instead of the end. The event format changed slightly compared with the previous year and also included a 3rd day of general discussion and hacking in the WMF offices. Many thanks to everyone that helped to organise the event!

I have an extremely long list of things todo that spawned from discussions at the summit, but as a summary of what happened below are some of the more notable scheduled discussion moments: